January 6, 2006

by Joel Derfner

Last night I dreamed I was Sydney Bristow from Alias and braved multifarious dangers to retrieve a microchip from a crowded amphitheater during an opera intermission, at which point I was suddenly sitting at a table with a group of people who thought I was a moron until I pulled out a knitted model of the human brain and named all its parts correctly, which forced them to revise their opinion of me.

I have no idea what this dream means, but I prefer it to the dreams I had when I was on Zoloft, which were both frightening and intensely boring. Like, I would dream that I got fired from my job and couldn’t get another one. Or that my friends got so mad at me they stopped being my friends.

Eventually I found a different medication, slightly less effective but without that particular side effect. It’s one thing to want to throw yourself in front of the subway train every time you walk into the station. But for your dreams to be stripped of metaphor–now that’s really depressing.

I just had a dream that one of my co workers was going for foot surgery so I gave him my shoes to wear. After the surgery I met him outside waiting for the bus to go home and he had an erect penis attached to his shoulder peeping out of the top of his shirt!

While on holiday at my parents’, I dreamt I was spontaneously examined by my graduate program, failed the examine, and asked to leave–frightening/boring. But then I segued directly into a dream in which I led a group of stunning, muscular men through a savage, snowy forest, accomplished daring feats in their name, and was subsequently pleasured sexually by each one in my tent. Shizzle.